Old Enough to Forget

The first time I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" on the radio, I was smitten. "What in the heck was that?" It was one of those HOLY SHIT songs that seemed to come out of nowhere. KISM from Bellingham had a strong enough signal to reach over into the suburbs where I lived. The song quickly worked it's way into heavy rotation, but I don't remember hearing it on the two big stations in Vancouver. It took me a while to find the record after first hearing the song. There was a record store across the street from where I worked and I looked for this new Yes album, and all I found where the old Yes records, nothing new. Of course this only happened once, and I'm sure this was all compressed into the span of a couple of weeks, if that. Soon the song along with the bleeding edge orchestral blasts that were unlike anything I'd heard before was everywhere. This was Yes? Yes. Of course there was no internet back in the day, just word of mouth and the burgeon...

Journey released Frontiers in '83 and the band was messing around with their winning recipe. The band had always been good, but the addition of Jonathan Cain, who took over keyboards from Gregg Rolie after 1980's Departure  gave the band an extra gear. Jonathan co-wrote all of the songs on Frontiers except for "Faithfully" which he brought to the band. Heck he was all over Escape too, but that's another story. You can read it here if you want ... or not. The band had gone diamond with Escape , a nearly impossible feat to replicate and I'm sure there was more than a little tension in the studio as they cut the tracks. I know that Journey was supposed to be Neal's band (according to Neal), and in many ways it is, but when Steve Perry arrived it was Neal and Steve, and then with Jonathan he became the third leg of the milking stool. I'm not dismissing Ross or the other Steve. Those guys were integral to the band's sound ... right up to when they weren...

After four albums it was time for the mandatory live record. Coming on the heels of Pat Benatar's Get Nervous Tour she released an odd hybrid album titled Live from Earth . The album was 80% live and two new studio tracks: the awesome "Love is a Battlefield" and the throwaway "Lipstick Lies" that is perplexingly bland. The band here was tight, Neil Geraldo on guitar, Myron Grombacher on drums, Roger Capps on bass and Charlie Giordano on keyboards. Neil runs the band through its paces, and for the most part the results are pretty decent, and in a couple of instances spectacular. His guitar tone at times was questionable and overly processed, but heck it was the early '80s and that was a thing. At the time it was cool. The album as you'd expect mines a little more from her latest album, but that's not a bad thing, it was top of mind to her audience. What was weird though was the omission of "Shadows of the Night" one of the best songs from th...

Spoons were never a band that was on my radar back in the day. I knew who they were, "Nova Heart" was a pretty great song, but there were a lot of great songs that never made it into my collection. Talkback  was produced by Nile Rodgers. Bowie's Let's Dance  was the other project Mr. Rodgers produced in '83. Oddly enough Nile passed over Culture Club who were hotter than something that was really hot to produce Talkback by Spoons. You'd have thunk that this would have helped secure Spoons a decent distribution deal ... but nope. Talkback would only see the light of day in Canada. Good for us I guess, bad for them and everyone else. Like the band's previous album Arias & Symphonies , Talkback would go gold in Canada, but the band's subsequent releases wouldn't fare so well. The big single was "Old Emotion" which is a song I sort of like and am sort of irritated by. The whammy bar dives never worked for me. It's not like Gordon Depp...

Well that didn't take long. I had mentioned didn't have the last Toronto album* when I was writing about the band's previous album Get It On Credit ,  (posted September 17, 2025) and sure enough when I was rummaging through the discount bins at Krazy Bobs there it was ... along with a baker's dozen other albums that came with me. I know there was one more album under the Toronto banner,  Assault & Flattery that was attributed Holly Woods & Toronto. Aside from Holly Woods, keyboardist Scott Kreyer was the only other member as Sheron Alton and Brian Allen were no longer in the band, so for me Girl's Night Out is the last album by the classic line up that dropped an album a year from 1980 to 1983. A blip on the radar but they left an indelible mark on Canadian rock. I know I've taken some pot shots at the band in the past and have been lukewarm to their albums as a whole. They always had a great single, and while I'd enjoy the albums they just never see...

Author's warning.*  After selling 5,000,000 copies of his break through album American Fool  in the US. John was back in '83 with Uh-Huh and proceeded to go triple platinum. However, here is Canada he was moved half a million copies of each album. He was pretty big deal here ... and he'd be a big deal for a while. I was never really a big John Cougar Mellencamp fan, I'm still not, but I like him enough to buy his albums when I find them. Oh make no mistake he was decent and in small doses pretty awesome. There was something about a whole album of John's tunes that just felt overly long. I'd almost go so far as to describe a lot of it as unvarnished pretentious rock and roll. A better name for the album would be Nuh Uh. John was earnest in his pursuit of grandeur. To be fair for all the clunkers he'd then come out with an absolute barn burner. I didn't know it at the time, but John was carving his own niche. Americana wasn't really a thing I was awar...

Money and Cigarettes , Eric Clapton's 1983 album is one of those neither fish nor fowl releases. As a kid Eric Clapton was one of those has beens who was a big deal in the late '60s and early '70s but his output through the rest of the decade to me was spotty. I actively disliked "I Shot the Sheriff" and thought "Cocaine" was stupid. I couldn't see the appeal to "Wonderful Tonight" although my buddy Gord loved it and it was his wedding song. I'm probably just strengthening the argument that I'm just an unwashed Luddite who has no idea which end of a telephone pole goes in the ground. I suppose I should have just said I wasn't really a fan of a lot of Eric's solo work and left it at that.  So why buy this at all? I found it for a buck, and I may not have been much of a fan, but come on - it's Eric Clapton and whether I'm a fan or not the guy is a legend. Besides I'll admit to really liking his late career resurgen...

One of the first songs I learned on guitar was "Tush" and to this day it's one of my favourite songs to play. I still remember the first time I heard "Tube Snake Boogie" at a youth group dance ... the irony isn't lost on me, and it was so good. We yelled for it to be played again so we could sing along with the part where he's singing about the sister. Good times. When '83 rolled around videos were suddenly a thing, and boy howdy ZZ Top managed to marry cool with the blues, big beards, cool cars and chicks. Boom. Suddenly the band was more than that little ol' band from Texas. With Eliminator,  ZZ Top's eighth album, the band was propelled into the heart of the mainstream. They may have had several gold and a platinum album under their collective belts but as with all things, there are levels, and holy moly Eliminator was a whole 'nother level for the band.  The album had legs (how could I not?) and for a couple of years the band was r...

China Crisis was one of those '80s bands I knew of, but had never heard. To me they were just another early English alternative new wave band that never really caught on in North America. That first blush of European new wave synth pop seemed short lived and was quickly assimilated into what would become the sound of the '80s. Fast forward four decades and a couple of years for good measure, I was flipping through the discount bin and there was a very nice looking copy of  Working with Fire and Steel - Possible Pop Songs Volume Two and my curiosity was piqued. Oh, for the record (not this one) there was no "volume one" but it was the band's second album I'd find out later. After a bath and a clean shirt (I replaced the insert) the album was ready. I seated myself on the centre cushion on the couch and had the lyric sheet ready to follow along. I felt very much like the guy on the chair in those old Maxell adverts. I would buy boxes of XLIIS tapes and when I go...

Author's note: Written from a Canadian perspective where the band never really caught on after their one big hit. Unbeknownst to be I'd been aware of Madness for a long time ... one of the nerdy kids in high school who was very much into those bands who were part of the first round of  English new wave acts. He had a very large ghetto blaster and he'd always be by his locker blaring out music. Whereas most of us were into Prism, or Trooper or The Cars this guy loved The Buzzcocks, The Clash and Madness. I remember hearing "One Step Beyond" (and liking it) but had no idea who it was. When "Our House" broke over here, it was infectious. Most people in North America, of which I was one, had no idea the band had been around for years. They may have looked like a bunch of fresh faced kids but they'd been around for years by 1983. I find it strange that "Our House" managed to crack the top 10 in the US without an album behind. The Rise & Fall...

Today I'm writing about The Tenants, one of those bands who got together, released a couple of albums and then disappeared. They are a band who was new to me and  their two albums were in stark contrast to one another, and only one is available to stream. Shall we begin? Every so often I'll pop in to Krazy Bob's and see what I can knock off my wish list. I went earlier in the morning mainly because the store would likely be empty, and for me that's when Bob is at his best. I hadn't seen him since well before Christmas and he greeted me warmly and he asked me what I was looking for. I mentioned a few things and he helped me look through the bins. His filing system is organized chaos, but it is organized. Within a few minutes I had crossed a couple things off my list and then Bob did what Bob does. "Hey, have you heard of these guys?" He's done this to me many times, and generally I try to glance at the price before committing, but he seldom pulls out an...

I bought this album for my dad because it was supposed to be a "jazz" album. I thought he'd like it ... maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He did though keep it, and recently when my mum was packing up her place to move she asked me to go through the records and I should take anything I wanted. Years earlier when dad was still alive he'd let me pillage his collection and I "borrowed" quite a few classics from early Ray Charles to Harry Belafonte and those albums would be lost on my watch. So I went through again and picked out a bunch of stuff, mostly stuff I'd given him over the years and a few old gospel albums that looked interesting. It's kind of weird listening to More Than a Feeling now after all this time and recognizing bits and pieces of songs I'd not heard in decades. I don't think I played this more than a few times back in the early '80s but not heard it since. What drew me to the band were the players. I'd seen guitarist...

1983 was a weird year. While Culture Club and Duran Duran were taking over the world with their videos, Genesis managed to sneak in under the radar and launch a sneak attack that took everyone by surprise. Okay, maybe not everyone, but it took me by surprise. What I knew about the band would have fit on the head of a pin. A large pin mind you, but other than a couple of songs I'd heard from Duke or Abacab I had never really listened to Genesis. I knew this was the band Phil Collins was in when he wasn't making solo records. You know, the "In the Air Tonight" guy who had the cool drum sound that everyone drummed on the dashboard when the song came on if you were in the car. With respect to this album, the song that first got my attention was "That's All" and it was catchy but didn't really make me want to rush out and buy the record, but I looked forward to hearing it on the radio. It was "Mama" that got me right in the feels. The evil laugh...